Still thinking about Ben Whitehouse. Our curator of drawings is organizing a show of his work for us for next year. Yesterday he came down to the museum to look at the space, present some of his work, discuss installation etc. I wish I could have gotten a close look at an actual painting, because apparently they are quite massive. On the web they looked to me to have an almost absence of gesture, like he was building them up in the thin washes of a watercolorist. In fact I thought of Thomas Girtin initially, although apparently this was barking up the wrong tree. Then we got into his presentation and the current work is more video and a series of painting exercises on the recording of light. The videos are 24 hour HD films of a single subject, which sounds wearisome (secretly how I find Warhol's Empire video) but which here in 3 minute clips of shifting light effects looked stunning. If the future exhibition includes all three sorts of work (oil landscape, oil light painting, video) the audience will see a real jump I think. And the reconciling of everything should be fun. This is what has me thinking.
I wish I could say more about this dichotomy in Whitehouse's work, but I still haven't figured out how far I should go talking about my job and/or artist's work intersecting it on this blog.
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